you dont have any hobby stores around your area? No general electronics stores? Ask friends, neighbors, relatives, etc if they know of any kind of stores like that... or if your close to the US border, come over here and go to Radioshack and get them

got any useless electronics sitting around? Open em up and see what kind of things you can scrap from them. Im sure youll find what your looking for relatively quickly

Ummm anything with motors or servos would be a good thing to start off with. Also anything that keeps time would be good to look through... ummmm I think things like remotes and such that output a frequency of some sort should have some...

What I would do is gather all the transistors and then look them up to see which transistor has the same function and is the same type as the transistor that I need.

For example a 1234 can work the same as a 5678 and be used interchangeably but a 1234 and a 2222 cannot be used interchangeably. Just look at the datasheets of the transistor you want and the transistor you found. And then just match em up!